Scott Ellsworth answers a question I’ve pondered ever since I first learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. How come I had never heard of it before? Beginning the day after the flames died out, white Tulsans did everything they could to bury the evidence. Police gathered up photographs and hid them. Government investigations and after-action reports from the National Guard vanished. Bodies of the dead were buried in unmarked mass graves. Newspaper accounts were cut and taken out of library archives. By tacit agreement, white Tulsans refused to discuss it. Black survivors, like Holocaust survivors after them, were too traumatized to tell their children.
Before the 9/11 attacks, the Tulsa race massacre of African Americans by a vigilante white mob was the worst attack on Americans in the country’s history (only if you overlook the decimation of Native American populations.)
Ellsworth, is a white, very professional historian, opens the book with an impartial account of events based on credible evidence. His description is in contrast to white apologists who insist that deaths were minimal and roughly equal between Blacks and whites. Angry African Americans suggest that the invasion of the Greenwood District of Tusla was a pre-meditated land grab. Ellsworth lays out what can be said with certainty based on surviving testimonies and documents.
The events were perpetrated by a riled up mob that ran out of control. Think about January 6 and the U.S. Capitol and shudder.
Much of the book is dedicated to Ellsworth’s tireless search for mass graves of murdered African Americans purportedly dumped right after the riot. For more than two decades, Ellsworth scoured stories and archives, cajoled governments, and sought assistance from archaeologists to help him search and eventually dig through potential locations. Ellsworth is a strong proponent of the idea of paying reparations to the offspring of families whose lives and livelihoods were snuffed out by an unapologetic white Tulsa.
His contribution was to find the bodies of some of those who had been disappeared so their remains could be returned and reburied with dignity. His other contribution was to write this book.
The first person was identified on July 12, 2024, following the exhumation of African Americans from a mass grave in Tulsa, Oklahoma. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/tulsa-massacre-oklahoma-mass-grave-cl-daniel-rcna161599